Bad Words on Wednesday: Should

I confess, I’ve watched the interview of Jordan Peterson by Cathy Newman a bunch of times, and have read a lot of the articles about it popping up everywhere. I really like this one, but pretty much everything I’ve read has been on point. It’s one thing to watch the sparring on twitter, and to read people in their comfortable enclaves on both the left and the right, but very telling to finally have two contenders go at it face to face, in the ring as it were, and see what happens.

So what I liked about the interview, and what I like about Peterson in general, because it’s so unusual anymore, is that he is essentially a realist. How are things really? That’s what he’s interested in. What are men really like? What issues do women really have? It’s an unusual question today. I’m used, everywhere, to hearing the word Should. Men should be like this. Women should be like that. We should all behave this way or have these kinds of jobs or be treated like this.

I mean, I do it myself. You should go to church, I always say, and believe in Jesus. You should because it’s the best thing for you. And I mash that up against the fact that I should clean my house and I should be a certain kind of mother.

Cathy Newman wants women to be treated a certain way, to have various barriers removed from her path, even though, as Peterson pointed out, she’s already climbed over a lot of them on her own. A couple of days ago John Piper wrote that women should not teach in seminaries in any capacity, because the pastorate, scripturally, is for the men. A little bitty part of me would love to watch a video of Cathy Newman reading that article, just to see if she would make it out alive. But really, on both sides of the chasm, the question is what Ought to Happen. What Should we do?

And the trouble is, which is what I like about Peterson, we don’t really know because we’re not willing to look at how things are right now. We leap very quickly to the solution, without properly understanding the facts on the ground.

I, by way of a meandering illustration, haven’t ever been able to muster up a self identification as a feminist. I like men too much, in the first place. But I also lived for a long time in the theological morass of men being constantly belittled and told to be quiet, of little boys being forbidden to play with trucks and plastic guns because the parents were eager for the little wretch to “chose his own gender.” Things he always wanted to play with were taken away from him because, even though the parents professed neutrality, they had a strongly held conviction that it would be better if he were a girl. Indeed, one of my favorite pastimes has always to stand in line for the airplane, or languish at the checkout, and observe the horror of a woman elegantly destroying the ego of her male partner. It’s the fascination of watching a train wreck. You know how it’s going to end, but you just can’t look away.

But lately, what with the burgeoning #metoo catastrophe, and the misery one can’t help feeling reading about Grace and her little tête-à-tête with Aziz Ansari, and the fact that practically all the women I know and love are teetering on the edge of diagnosable anxiety, depression, and stress, I’m more than willing to finally acknowledge that women don’t have it that great right now. They way they really are isn’t really understood, even by me, which means that how can any of us know what they really Should do. I mean, maybe we understood them two hundred years ago, although that’s a dubious proposition, but as we go on, what would be good and helpful isn’t clear at all.

That’s why I love Peterson’s refrain, which you will hear if you watch him on YouTube particularly talking about women. “I don’t know,” he says all the time, “the answer’s not clear at all.”

I mean, I could, at this point, offer a neatly tied and comfortably packaged answer “from the Bible.” Women should be like this, I could say, and men should be like this, because that’s what all the verses say. And really, they do say an awful lot. But they aren’t neatly assembled in a list. And most of us don’t have eyes to see them because we aren’t really seeing anything. We have a too rosy view of the past, an overly apocalyptic view of the present, and all of us have bad exegetical and theological habits.

I don’t think it would be a bad thing at all for even Christians to take a cue from Peterson contending with Newman–to cut away all the assumptions and hurt feelings, to admit to how things really are, to properly and truly articulate the culture in which we live, without once using the word Should, and then go and do the same thing with the Bible. We might come out on the other side not having to say, “I don’t know what we Should do,” but something like, “Lets try this.”